Borderlands 2: The Gateway Drug to Nerdy Addictions

Who got all these numbers in my shooter? Borderlands 2 attempts to hybridize two genres, but can it blend the fan bases?Screengrab: Wired

Borderlands 2, released for PC and consoles this week, is a unique hybrid of game genres. The moment-to-moment gameplay action is that of a first-person shooter. Your survival is largely predicated on your ability to aim at things and not get shot. But the overall structure is more akin to Skyrim than anything else. You explore an open-ended world, taking quests from non-player characters, and raising your character’s stats by leveling up.

Juggling numbers is as important in Borderlands as in any more traditional role-playing game. You’re constantly opening futuristic containers — they’re just treasure chests in a post-apocalyptic steampunk wrapping — and finding more loot that you’ve got to compare to your current equipment.

And just because you shoot an enemy doesn’t mean you’ll do much damage, if you haven’t equipped a weapon of sufficiently advanced statistics. The barrage of numbers, representing the damage done by each of the bullets, keeps cluing players in to the fact that what they’re playing isn’t entirely shooter.

Playing the game this week, going on “sidequests” (something entirely alien to today’s linear gungasms) and searching for that ever more elusive high that comes each time you level up, I got to wondering: Does Borderlands exist in a little niche all its own, alienating both shooter and RPG fans alike with foreign gameplay concepts?

Or is it a gateway drug, allowing nerds of both stripes to experience the joys of the other side, and ultimately leading to experimentation with harder stuff?

So I asked on Twitter: Does anyone out there know any shooter fans who tried the original Borderlands, found themselves hooked on looting chests and leveling up, and went on to try other role-playing games?

Twitterer Jordan Rodkey wrote back and said that this had happened to a friend. “I got him to play through Borderlands,” he said in an e-mail, “and months later he wanted to try some more RPGs because they were long and he liked seeing the next level up.”

An encouraging first response! But Rodkey’s was the only answer I got in that vein.

A review of Borderlands 2 posted that evening on the Wall Street Journal’s entertainment blog was another piece of evidence contradicting my theory. The writer evaluated Borderlands 2 as a competitor to Call of Duty, and found it wanting, criticizing its lack of a competitive multiplayer mode (it allows players to cooperate, not compete).

“I played with my 14-year-old son, and we found ourselves spending a lot of time mindlessly opening supply boxes and mailboxes to find bullets, health boosts and other goodies we didn’t really want or need yet,” the Journal‘s reporter wrote.

“I was still an incompetent FPS player, but I could survive long enough to figure out who was shooting at me.”

So perhaps the joys of looting and leveling are not necessarily going to be immediately apparent to fans of straight shooters.

The twist was that I got more of a response from players who said it worked the other way. Twitter user Ian Vaflor got me in touch with his friend Matt Hoffenson, who I reached via email while he was waiting in line at a Pennsylvania GameStop store for Borderlands 2 to go on sale at midnight.

“I only started playing Borderlands because of constant pressure from Ian,” Hoffenson, 32, wrote. “I suck at videogames and have terrible reflexes and hand-eye coordination… I also never really enjoyed the competitive nature of most first-person shooters.”

“The fact that Borderlands was such an obvious homage to Diablo 2 made it immediately accessible for me,” he said. “Once the skill tree got introduced, I really felt like I was in my element. I was still an incompetent FPS player, but I could make up for my shortcomings by spending points in the tank tree so I could survive long enough to figure out who was shooting at me.”

Borderlands has thus been made more accessible for shooter beginners — not by dumbing the game down, but by actually increasing the complexity of the system in a way that lets nerds use their special nerd power of math to succeed.

Grant Denby, 20, from Edwardsville, Illinois, wrote to say that he has branched out into other first-person shooter games after playing Borderlands. He had slow Internet speeds growing up, he says, which kept him from competing in fast-paced online multiplayer games. Once they got an Xbox 360, he was still so used to slower-paced strategy games that he didn’t bother too much with shooters, especially since the controller was so different from the keyboard and mouse setup he was used to.

“When Borderlands came out,” he said, “I started playing it and after getting the hang of the controls, I loved it. I was able to customize my character like other RPGs and really enjoyed the setting [and] story. This was a major plus as I kept wanting to go further and see what was next. After that I looked into more [shooters like] Team Fortress 2 and Vanquish and found them to be really enjoyable.”

So, congratulations, fans of shooting things: Borderlands‘s hybridization of role-playing and head-popping seems to be bringing more players into your preferred genre, even if you aren’t returning the favor in similar numbers.

Maybe this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. If you like shooters, the videogame industry is more than happy to shower you with them throughout the year. Feeling like you need to cap a mofo? Just this winter alone, you’re about to get Halo, Call of Duty and Medal of Honor and that’s just for starters.

But what about role-players? As vast as Skyrim‘s world may be, players have already explored every nook and cranny of it by now since it was released in 2011. Where are the role-playing games coming this holiday season for them?

There aren’t any — nothing as technologically impressive and content-rich as Skyrim, anyway.

So it shouldn’t have been a surprise if more RPG fans cross over to shooters thanks to Borderlands than the other way around. In terms of triple-A experiences, it’s the RPG nerds who are underserved.

As it becomes more and more risky and costly to release big-budget games, publishers will want to cast wider nets. If that’s the case, Borderlands, or something like it, could be the perfect videogame of the future — attractive enough to shooter fans, but also snapping up extra dollars from addicted role-players desperately looking for that increasingly rare fix.

Or maybe it’ll succeed only into converting RPG players into shooter fans, allowing the big-budget industry to live what sometimes appears to be its dream of just making one single genre of games forever.